Australian author Gerald Murnane, 79, has taken home the fiction prize of the 2018 Prime Minister’s Literary awards, for his novel Border Districts.
Photograph: Giramondo Publishing

Gerald Murnane has beaten Peter Carey, Richard Flanagan, Kim Scott and Michelle de Kretser to win $80,000 for his novel Border Districts in the fiction category at the 2018 Prime Minister’s Literary awards.

Judged by panel, the awards are among the most prestigious in Australia and the richest, with $600,000 in total prize money awarded across six categories, including $5,000 for each of the 30 shortlisted authors.

Biographer John Edwards, who wrote the bestselling Keating: The Inside Story, won in the Australian history category for his first volume of John Curtin’s War; journalist Richard McGregor won in the nonfiction category for Asia’s Reckoning; poet Brian Castro won for his novel in verse Blindness and Rage; Richard Yaxley won in the young adult category for This is My Song; and Glenda Millard and illustrator Stephen Michael won for children’s literature, for Pea Pod Lullaby.

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Murnane’s novel, Border Districts, was shortlisted for this year’s Miles Franklin, marking a banner year for the famously eccentric author, now 79. An effusive profile in the New York Times in March proclaimed him the “greatest living English-language writer most people have never heard of”, and praised his “strange and wonderful and nearly impossible to describe” books, which include The Plains and Landscape With Landscape. American writer Teju Cole, meanwhile, called him “a genius” and a “heir to Beckett”.

Murnane, who also released a short story collection this year, rarely ventures far from his tiny town of Goroke in western Victoria, and wasn’t present to collect his award.

In a rare outing in September, the writer seemed surprised and delighted at the sudden deluge of praise after a career that – save his loyal cult following – has largely flown under the radar. “It’s uncanny that there should be this number of people here, most of you are on my wavelength, and so few readers were in earlier years,” he said to the packed room at the Wheeler Centre in Melbourne.

The panel judging the fiction category praised Murnane for his “inimitable literary sensibility”, in “a perfectly formed short work” that is “associative rather than narrative”.

“The narrative is an exquisite prism of introspection, in which a life’s experiences are carefully ordered and transformed into art by virtue of the patterns they come to form in the mind and the profoundly evocative qualities they have acquired.

“Rendered in crystalline prose and touched with an elegiac pathos, Border Districts is the crowning achievement of a singular literary career.”

The winner of the nonfiction category, Richard McGregor, was praised for his book Asia’s Reckoning, which charts the influence US politics has had on the Pacific region, as the Trump administration threatens to upend old alliances. The judges called the book “important”, “beautifully composed” and “ground-breaking”, and “set to become the definitive text on this subject”.

2018 Prime Minister’s Literary awards – the shortlist

Fiction

Winner: Border Districts by Gerald Murnane A Long Way from Home by Peter CareyFirst Person by Richard Flanagan Taboo by Kim Scott The Life to Come by Michelle de Kretser

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Nonfiction

Winner: Asia’s Reckoning by Richard McGregor Mischka’s War: A European Odyssey of the 1940s by Sheila Fitzpatrick No Front Line: Australia’s Special Forces at War in Afghanistan by Chris Masters The Library: A Catalogue of Wonders by Stuart Kells Unbreakable by Jelena Dokic and Jessica Halloran

Australian history

Winner: John Curtin’s War: The coming of war in the Pacific, and reinventing Australia, volume 1 by John EdwardsBeautiful Balts: From Displaced Persons to New Australians by Jayne Persian Hidden in Plain View: The Aboriginal People of Coastal Sydney by Paul Irish Indigenous and Other Australians Since 1901 by Tim Rowse The Enigmatic Mr Deakin by Judith Brett

Poetry

Winner:Blindness and Rage: A Phantasmagoria by Brian CastroArchipelago by Adam AitkenChatelaine by Bonny Cassidy Domestic Interior by Fiona Wright Transparencies by Stephen Edgar

Young Adult literature

Winner: This is My Song by Richard YaxleyLiving on Hope Street by Demet Divaroren My Lovely Frankie by Judith Clarke Ruben by Bruce Whatley The Ones that Disappeared by Zana Fraillon